Peter Boyles on his new face lift, and why he's happy not to look like Kenny Rogers (PHOTOS)

Face lifts get a bad rap thanks to people like Kenny Rogers, who regularly appears on lists of horrific, shield-your-eyes worst plastic surgery disasters. But KHOW talk-show host Peter Boyles emerged from the process as an extremely satisfied booster of the procedure.

"I really recommend it," he says. "This is kind of a fresh start."

Boyles jokes that he went through his mid-life crisis "about ten years ago," but this past year has been a difficult one for him thanks largely to a divorce. Then, he says, "a friend of mine went through it -- somebody a lot of people know -- and he looked really good. So I thought, 'You know what? I'm going to do it.'"

For the procedure itself, Boyles turned to Dr. Brent Smith, someone he'd known previously, which increased his comfort level in regard to the procedure. He expressed his trepidations upfront. "I told him, 'I don't want to look like I'm always surprised,'" Boyles recalls. "You see people who had face lifts, like Jack Lemmon and Kenny Rogers, and I didn't want to look like that."

He was reassured by technology. "Brent has a computer system, where they take your picture, put it up on the computer and morph it to show you exactly what it's going to look like, so there are no surprises." Moreover, Boyles maintained a sense of humor throughout the process. As he notes, "Brent told me, 'We'll take fifteen or twenty years off.' And I said, 'I'll still look like an old white guy.'"

The surgery itself took place on September 8 -- a date chosen by the motorcyclist and outdoors lover because it was "after Sturges and before ski season" -- and Boyles was back on the job a few days later, albeit with black eyes and a swollen face. "I looked like I used to look after a bad Saturday night," he points out.

Today, Boyles is totally healed, and so satisfied by the results that he sees no reason to clam up. Unlike many media pros, he's been forthright about his face lift -- and he says some of those in the market who've kept quiet about the work they've had done aren't thrilled about his openness. But "it gets back to the way I dealt with my drug-and-alcohol recovery," he says. "I didn't want to hide it, didn't want to be weird about it. I talked about it on the air before I went in for the surgery, and I've talked about it afterward." And while he concedes that he's had conversations about potential television projects to supplement his radio gigs (everything's in the discussion stage), he stresses that "I didn't do this because of TV. I did this because it was something I wanted to do."

In the wake of a Denver Post item about his surgery, Boyles has gotten some nasty e-mails -- "ones that say, 'You look like an old woman.' But those things happen when you're in a job like mine. If they weren't sending you stuff like that, you'd think you were doing something wrong."

Personally, he doesn't see an enormous difference in his appearance when he looks in a mirror. But he feels the changes -- "I had the fat-neck thing, the heavy cheeks, and they took all that away," he says -- stand out when he compares before-and-after photos like those supplied by Smith's office that are on view below.